There is no cure for presentation stage fright. You can reduce the symptoms with beta blockers, but when the drugs wear off, you're still… you. You're still up there with a cracking voice, runaway heart rate, and nauseating dread.

So what do you do? You read posts with titles like “Ten Tips For Better Presentations”, “Kick-ass With PowerPoint”, and “Public Speaking Secrets of Martin Luther King”. You read excellent books like “Resonate”, “Presentation Zen”, and “Confessions of a Public Speaker.” You Level Up Your Presentation Skills.

You practice practice practice.

You work on your 12-17 seconds of eye contact. You work on your posture, hand-gestures, and VOICE PROJECTION. You watch a thousand hours of TED talks.

You work on your Opening With Humour, your 3-Act Narrative, and your Emotional Hooks.

And since the bar has gone up for even the geekiest conferences today, you work on your evocative-yet-not-cliche graphics, your designer-but-not-default-theme layout, and your clever-yet-clean typography.

But because you are a human, your stage fright now–after working on it so very very hard–is worse.

Nothing cuts stage fright like focusing on the million ways you’re doin’ it wrong.

If you have severe stage fright, the worst way to improve your presentation is to focus on your presentation skills.

Presentation skills are all about YOU. What YOU do. What YOU say. How YOU say it. Stage fright is all about YOU. What they think about YOU. What they tweet about YOU. What they tell everyone in your professional community about YOU.

The Big Problem is… YOU.

Or rather, the problem is thinking that what matters in your presentation is you. Because unless you're a paid performer – musician, comedian, motivational speaker – you are not the reason they came to the conference. They are sitting in your session because of someone that matters far more to them than you: themselves. They are there for their own experiences, and “watching you present” is not one of those experiences.

My path to coping with heart-stopping stage-fright is to focus NOT on what I do but on what they experience. And since I'm a software developer, I’ll think of the audience as my users.

And if they’re my users, then this presentation is a user experience.

And if it's a user experience, then what am I?

Ah... now we’re at the place where stage fright starts to dissolve.

Because if the presentation is a user experience, than I am just a UI.

That’s it.

I am a UI.

Nothing more.

And what’s a key attribute of a good UI?

It disappears.

It does not draw attention to itself.

It enables the user experience, but is not itself the experience.

And the moment I remember this is the moment I exhale and my pulse slows. Because I am not important. What is important is the experience they have. My job is to provide a context in which something happens for them.

When you design for a user experience, you quit focusing on your skills and start focusing on their skills. What experience can you help them have? Can you give them a more powerful perspective? Can you give them a new idea with immediate implementation steps they can't wait to work on? Can you give them a clear way to finally explain something to others that they've been feeling but could not articulate? Can you give them a new tip or trick that has such a high-payoff it feels like a superpower? Can you give them knowledge and insight into a tough topic, sothey can have more interesting, high-resolution conversations in the hallway?

And now we're truly at the heart of what matters most in a presentation. Look at the previous paragraph of experiences you can help them have. What's the common thread? It's not really about the user experience they have during your presentation. Like your presentation, their experience of it is also just the enabler for something bigger. Because what matters most is NOT the UX but the POST-UX UX. What happens after and as a result of the user experience? The best software and product designers know this. The best game designers know this. The best authors know this. The best filmmakers know this. What happens after what happens happens?

When they walk away from the user experience, then what? Are they different? Are they a little smarter? Are they a little more energized? Are they a little more capable? Are they a little more likely to talk to others about it?

This is no different from the goals we have for any other product/service/tool/book we create for others to use. It is always about the post-UX-UX. Otherwise, we have wasted their precious time and scarce cognitive resources. And when that happens, they will care about our non-optimal presentation skills.

But we still need Minimum Useful Presentation Skills to “be a UI”

We need just enough skills to create the UX that leads to the post-UX UX. And that's a hell of a lot less than what we’ve been told we need. Your users must be able to hear you, so try to not speak too quickly for the room acoustics. They must be able to see what's on the screen, so it's worth paying attention to text and graphic sizes and contrast. And they must be able to stay awake and focused, so it's worth trying to have some sense of pacing and variety, though there's a surprisingly easy presentation hack for this. A hack that violates a lot of the standard presentation slide advice. A key to helping your audience stay focused is to NOT maintain a consistent look and feel.

If you watch my presentations, you'll see my slides frequently shifting from black text on white background to white text on black background. I change fonts. I place the text in different (yes, random) places on the screen from slide to slide. I do almost everything you are NOT supposed to do. I do not make beautiful slides. I often use way too many slides (300+ in my last 1 hour talk).

I have taken this to an extreme that sometimes does get in the way, drawing attention to itself, and that is the one thing I am working to correct. If too many fonts and variations becomes noticeable on its own, then I've just violated the "UI should vanish" rule. The goal is to have enough variety to keep their brain alert, but not so extreme that it draws attention to itself.

And what of the three-act, emotional hook, narrative arc? What about personal stories, appropriate humor, etc.? None of this really matters unless/except in service to the user experience you're designing for. And again, there is a surprisingly simple trick that is usually just as effective as the most artfully-crafted narrative:

Open with a question they would very much like an answer for.

That's it. Pose a question. You don't have to announce you're going to answer it, just… start. If you're looking for an opening phrase, try something like, “Imagine you want to…” and then go. Don't hesitate. And whatever you do, do NOT try to “establish your credibility”. Never try to tell them or sell them on why they should listen to you. If the question is one they want answered, their brain won't let it go. The rest of the presentation is just a steady reveal of the answer(s).

Be the UI

When I give a presentation, whether it's a mega-event keynote or a small intimate meeting, I have one crucial rule: nobody is allowed to introduce me. If they insist, then it must be only my name (though I try to discourage that too). And I do not introduce myself. This has been my rule since my first conference, and not only does it send the message that I (the presenter) am not what matters, it's also a powerful stage-fright reducer. It lets you step up to the podium as a UI rather than The Presenter. This matters.

Because if YOU are a UI, then what is a presenter’s introduction? That annoying splash screen.

If you, like me, struggle with terrifying stage-fright, you might try this: as you prepare a presentation, keep a giant post-it in front of you that says, “YOU ARE JUST A UI”. Keep the focus off of you so you can get on with creating an experience for the people who do matter: your audience. Your users. Because every moment we spend obsessing over how this will make us look is a moment NOT devoted to how our presentation will make them look.

In 1999, Professor Baba Shiv (currently at Stanford) and his co-author Alex
Fedorikhin did a simple experiment on 165 grad students.They asked half to
memorize a seven-digit number and the other half to memorize a two-digit number.
After completing the memorization task, participants were told the experiment was
over, and then offered a snack choice of either chocolate cake or a fruit bowl.

The participants who memorized the seven-digit number were nearly 50%
more likely than the other group to choose cake over fruit.

Researchers were astonished by a pile of experiments that led to one bizarre conclusion:

Willpower and cognitive processing draw from the same
pool of resources.

Spend hours at work on a tricky design problem? You’re more
likely to stop at Burger King on the drive home. Hold back from saying what you
really think during one of those long-ass, painful meetings? You’ll struggle with the
code you write later that day.

Since both willpower/self-control and cognitive tasks drain the same tank,
deplete it over here, pay the price over there. One pool. One pool of scarce, precious, easily-depleted resources. If you spend the day exercising
self-control (angry customers, clueless co-workers), by the time you get home your cog resource tank is flashing E.

The tank is empty.

And even if
you loved solving tough puzzles at work, the drain on your self-control still
happens. One pool. Whether the drain was from something you love or
hate doesn’t matter.

Cognitive resource tank don’t care.

You snap at the kids or dog over the tiniest thing.

Or the dog snaps at you.

An experiment
asked one group of dogs to sit, just sit, nothing else, for a few minutes before being
released to play with their favorite treat “puzzle” toy (the ones where the dog has
to work at getting the treats out of it). The other group of dogs were allowed to
just hang out in their crates before getting the treat puzzle.

You know where this goes: the dogs that had to sit — exercising self-control — gave up on the puzzle much earlier than the dogs that were
just hanging out in their crate.The dogs that were NOT burning cognitive
resources being obedient had more determination and mental/emotional energy for solving the puzzle. Think about that next time you ask Sparky to be patient. His cognitive
resources are easily-depleted too.

Now think about what we're doing to our users.

If your UX asks the user to make choices, for example, even if those choices are both clear and useful, the act of deciding is a cognitive drain. And not just while they're deciding... even after we choose, an unconscious cognitive background thread is slowly consuming/leaking resources, "Was that the right choice?"

If your app is confusing and your tech support / FAQ isn't helpful, you’re drawing down my scarce, precious, cognitive resources. If your app behaves counter-intuitively – even just once – I'll leak cog resources every time I use it, forever, wondering, "wait, did that do what I expected?". Or let's say your app is super easy to use, but designed and tuned for persuasive brain hacks ("nudges", gamification, behavioral tricks, etc.) to keep me "engaged" for your benefit, not mine (lookin' at you, Zynga)... you've still drained my cognitive resources.

And when I
back away from the screen and walk to the kitchen...

Your app makes me fat.

If our work drains a user’s cognitive resources, what does he lose? What else could he have done with those scarce, precious, easily-depleted resources? Maybe he’s trying to stick with that diet. Or practice guitar. Or play with his kids.

That one new feature you added? That sparkly, Techcrunchable, awesome feature? What did it cost your user? If the result of your work consumes someone’s cognitive resources, they can’t use those resources for other things that truly, deeply matter. This is NOT about consuming their time and attention while they're using your app. This is about draining their ability for logical thinking, problem-solving, and willpower after the clicking/swiping/gesturing is done.

Of course it's not implicitly bad if our work burns a user's cog resources.Your app might be the one place your user wants to spend those resources. But knowing that interacting with our product comes at a precious cost, maybe we’ll make different choices.

Maybe we’ll think more about what our users really care about. Maybe we’ll ask ourselves at each design meeting, “is this a Fruit-choosing feature or a Cake-choosing feature?” and we’ll try to limit Cake-choosing features—the ones that really drain them — to that which supports the thing they're using our app for in the first place.

(Yes, cognitive resources can be partly replenished throughout the day by getting glucose to the brain, but be careful with that. A high-protein snack combined with small infrequent sips on a sports drink can help, a lot.)

But even if we can justify consuming our user's cognitive resources while they're using our product, what about our marketing? Can we honestly believe that our "content marketing" is a good use of their resources? "Yes, because it adds value." we tell ourselves. But what does that even mean? Can we honestly say that "engaging with our brand" is a healthy, ethical use of their scarce, precious, limited cognitive resources? "Yes, because our content isuseful."

And that's all awesome and fabulous and social and 3.0ish except for one, small, inconvenient fact: zero sum. What you consume here, you take from there. Not just their attention, not just their time, but their ability to be the person they are when they are at their best. When they have ample cognitive resources. When they can think, solve-problems, and exercise self-control. When they can create, make connections, and stay focused.

Is that "content" worth it? Maybe. But instead of "Is this useful?" perhaps we should raise the bar and ask "Will they use it?" (and so, yeah, I'm more than a little self-conscious about typing that as I consume your cognitive resources. But I didn't start Serious Pony to save your cognitive resources; I want to help save the cognitive resources of your users).

I'm not against "content marketing". On the contrary, it's nearly the only form of cog-resource-draining marketing that can be "worth it". It's the one form of marketing that can help people become better at something they care about. It's one form of marketing with the potential to deliver the user-learning so few companies care about. Content marketing can (and should) be "the missing manual." It can (and should be) the inspiration for our users to learn, get better (at the thing they care about), and connect with other users.

But if it's "content" designed solely to suck people in ("7 ways to be OMG awesome!!") for the chance to "convert", we're hurting people. If we're pumping out "content" because frequency, we're hurting people. I'm hurting some of you now. That's on me. It's why I try to use graphics to make the key point, so you don't have to read the post (also because I'm really rambly-aroundy, I know, workin' on it.)

My father died unexpectedly last week, and as happens when one close to us dies, I had the "on their deathbed, nobody thinks..." moment. Over the past 20 years of my work, I've created interactive marketing games, gamified sites (before it was called that), and dozens of other projects carefully, artfully, scientifically designed to slurp (gulp) cognitive resources for... very little that was "worth it". Did people willingly choose to engage with them? Of course. And by "of course" I mean, not really, no. Not according to psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics research of the past 50 years. They were nudged/seduced/tricked. And I was pretty good at it. I am so very, very sorry.

My goal for Serious Pony is to help all of us take better care of our users. Not just while they are interacting with our app, site, product, but after. Not just because they are our users, but because they are people.

Because on their deathbed, our users won't be thinking,"If only I'd spent more time engaging with brands."

Help them conserve and manage their scarce, precious, easily-depleted cognitive resources for what really matters. To them. And don't forget to take care of your own. Think of the kids. Think of Sparky.

(That's actually my Icelandic sheepdog Boi)

--This post began as a small essay I wrote for the lovely group at Uncommon.